Sunday, August 31, 2014

"The Coca-Cola Company is, of course, a capitalist
company meaning that its goal is to make money virtually any way
possible. It’s good at this. Its market cap today is $168.7 billion
according to Forbes. Since it’s founding in the late 1800’s it is now
known to be the most recognized product in the world. Its goal of making
money is accomplished regardless of the consequences be it
environmental degradation, pollution, abuse of and destabilizing water
use, worker assassinations, discrimination in the work place, or the
health of individuals drinking its product, to name but a few.
Promoting a product that requires purchase by huge numbers of
individuals in order to make a profit necessitates deliberate efforts at
creating a positive public image. It’s good at that also but it is
simultaneously considered by some as one of the most evil corporations
in the world – a designation that suits it well."

So begins a lengthy article by Heather Gray from herecharting the company's 'egregious history' and expansion over the globe with in depth coverage of some of the issues mentioned above and including references to its apartheid connections and examples of its generally 'oppressive, arrogant behaviour.'If you know someone who doesn't seem to be aware of just some of Coca-Cola's tactics and business practices, then this is the article to send to them - after having read it first yourself, of course.

In fact, all the talk-talk-talk about
lazy parasites pouring over borders to leech off another nation’s
resources doesn’t go far enough in explaining the gravity of this
ongoing crisis. Scream it from the mountaintops (or at least on your
blog):

Immigrants are destroying any and all
hope of for planetary survival.

Illegal aliens are Public Enemy #1.

Foreigners are terrorists.

If you don’t believe me, just ask any sweatshop worker in, say, Vietnam…

The perfidious colonizers I refer to, of
course, are the insatiable transnational corporations setting up camp
all across the (so-called) Third World. Whether it be Nike, Wal-Mart, Monsanto, or any other taxpayer-subsidized bloodsucker, these crafty illegal aliens can’t be stopped by constructing a mere wall.

They travel with impunity… on the wings
of government subvention and cunning, relentless propaganda. Thanks to
decades of conditioning, even the victims of these soulless migrants
will voluntarily pay for the right to wear a shirt bearing their
corporate logo.

One would not be engaging in hyperbole to
characterize these illegal invaders as “terrorists.” Forget color-coded
alerts, staged arrests, and manufactured scares. Put aside those times
you were forced to remove your shoes at the airport. As defined at
Dictionary.com, “an overwhelming feeling of fear and anxiety” and/or an
“intense, overpowering fear” characterize brand of the terror I speak
of.

While the corporate media obscures the
real terror and trains its focus on the latest battle between god’s
country and ISIS (or whomever the villain of the day is), the primary
conflict on the planet remains unchanged: globalization from above vs.
globalization from below.

“Immigrants” like the World Trade
Organization, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and transnational
corporations and “agreements” like the TPP
are elements of a mutant form of remote control imperialism. The United
States doesn't always have to send armies into other countries. It
sends in Disney and McDonalds with the (usually) unspoken threat of
military force backing them up.

Closing Thought: Globalization is not intrinsically a bad idea.

In fact, it’d be ideal if -- instead of
exploitation, repression, and ecocide -- we were globalizing equity,
solidarity, diversity, and environmental balance. As Arundhati Roy once
declared: “In the present circumstances, I’d say that the only thing
worth globalizing is dissent.”

The Sun King, Louis XIV of France, was born in September 1638. He dedicated his life to glorious wars against his neighbours.
During his reign two successive famines killed more than two million Frenchmen. The figure is known thanks to the mechanical calculator invented by Blaise Pascal half a century earlier. The cause, too, is known thanks to Voltaire who later wrote, 'Good policy relies on this secret: knowing how to let die of hunger the people who allow the rest of us to live.'

(amended from Eduardo Galeano's 'Children of the Days')

Sad to say that some things are very slow to change. With all the knowledge, science and technology available to us there is little commitment to put a stop to the numerous appalling events resulting in hunger happening around the world on a non-stop basis. Desperate hunger for millions every day, in countries both 'rich' and 'poor'. Although most citizens of the world would want to see an end of this, with governments tied ever tighter to the global capitalist system there is no possibility of reaching the ever-receding humanitarian 'goals' which are cynically updated every few years. Nothing will change until we decide, together, that the system must change in order for it to work for us all. That's what socialism is about.JS

Saturday, August 30, 2014

91 per cent of all farm households in the US rely on multiple sources
of income. No farmer wants his children to take up farming in North
America.

This is happening in a country where
the Farm Bill 2014 makes a provision for $962 billion of federal
subsidy support for agriculture for the next 10 years.

In Europe, the
situation is equally alarming. Despite 40 per cent of the European
annual budget being devoted to agriculture, one farmer quits agriculture
every minute. In Canada, the National Farmers Union has in a study
shown that while the 70-odd agribusiness companies are raking in
profits, farmers are the only segment of the food chain incurring
losses. As I have been saying for long, more than 80 per cent of the
agricultural subsidies in America and Europe actually go to agribusiness
corporations.

Farmers are a dying breed. Writing
in Newsweek magazine, Max Kutner says: “For decades, farmers across
America have been dying by suicide at higher rates than the general
population. The exact numbers are hard to determine, mainly because
suicides by farmers are under-reported (they may get mislabelled as
hunting or tractor accidents, advocates for prevention say) and because
the exact definition of a farmer is elusive.” Well, what is happening in
America is not an isolated development; farmers are dying across the
globe.

According to news reports, nearly 80
per cent of the 2,800,000 rural people who take their own lives every
year in China are victims of farm land acquisition. In India, almost
300,000 farmers have ended their lives since 1995. Again, like in the
US, farmer suicides are also under-reported in India with some states
now trying to hide them by shifting these deaths to some other
categories. Even in Europe, which provides massive subsidy support under
the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the serial death dance continues
unabated. In France, 500 suicides have been reported in a year. In
Ireland, UK, Russia, and Australia farmers, are a dying breed.

In India, although we keep on saying
that agriculture is the mainstay of the economy, in reality it isn’t.
Employing some 52 per cent of the population, the share of agriculture
in the country’s GDP has been progressively on the decline. It is less
than 14 per cent now. I have been saying for long that small farmers
have to get into multiple jobs to keep their chulas burning. Such is the
pathetic state of Indian agriculture that some studies point to roughly
58 per cent farmers relying on MNREGA, which provides 100 days
guaranteed employment.

Still worse, the people who feed the
country actually sleep hungry themselves. More than 60 per cent go to
bed hungry every night. Nothing can be a worse illustration of the great
tragedy on the farm.

It’s not because of any unexplained
natural calamity or the attack of a virus that the farms across the
globe are dying. It is part of a global economic design to move farmers
out of agriculture, and by doing so to shift food production into the
hands of heavily subsidised and environmentally destructive agribusiness
companies. It is generally believed that for any country to grow
economically, the share of agriculture in the GDP must be brought down.
In US, agriculture is only 4 per cent of its GDP. In India, it is less
than 14 per cent now. By the end of 2020, I am sure it would be brought
down to less than 10 per cent. Small scale agriculture is, therefore,
deliberately being strangulated.

Such is the plight of Indian
agriculture that in six years — from 2007 to 2012 — 3.2 crore (32 million) farmers
have abandoned farming and moved into the cities looking for menial
jobs. According to census 2011, every day 2,500 farmers quit
agriculture. Some other studies have shown that roughly 50,000 people
migrate from a village (and that includes farmers) into a town/city
every day. As per a NSSO study, 42 per cent farmers want to quit if
given an alternative.

In Punjab, which is the frontline
agricultural state in the country, 98 per cent rural households are
under debt. Studies have shown that the average outstanding debt per
household is about Rs4.5 lakh per year which accounts for 96 per cent of
the yearly income. If farming is in such a terrible state in Punjab,
the state of affairs in the rest of the country can be well imagined.

In my understanding, the unwritten
economic prescription is to make farming non-viable so that farmers are
left with no other choice but to quit. In a quest to keep food prices
low, which comes in very handy to freeze the minimum support price for
farmers the predominant economic thinking supports large agribusiness
conglomerates. This is being made much easier by the growing demand for
amending the newly enacted land acquisition law. More and more land will
now pass on into the hands of industry and real estate, forcing farmers
to do menial jobs in the cities. The demise of the farmer therefore is
predetermined. It’s only a matter of time before the farmer as a species
goes extinct.

Adults employed full time in the U.S. report working an average of 47
hours per week, almost a full workday longer than what a standard
five-day, 9-to-5 schedule entails. In fact, half of all full-time
workers indicate they typically work more than 40 hours, and nearly four
in 10 say they work at least 50 hours.

The 40-hour workweek is widely regarded as the standard for full-time
employment, and many federal employment laws -- including the
Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare" -- use this threshold to define what
a full-time employee is. However, barely four in 10 full-time workers
in the U.S. indicate they work precisely this much. The hefty proportion
who tell Gallup they typically log more than 40 hours each week push
the average number of hours worked up to 47. Only 8% of full-time
employees claim to work less than 40 hours.

These findings are based on data from Gallup's annual Work and
Education Survey. The combined sample for 2013 and 2014 includes 1,271
adults, aged 18 and older, who are employed full time.

While for some workers the number of hours worked may be an indicator
of personal gumption, for others it may be a function of their pay
structure. Hourly workers can be restricted in the amount they work by
employers who don't need or can't afford to pay overtime. By contrast,
salaried workers generally don't face this issue. And, perhaps as a
result, salaried employees work five hours more per week, on average,
than full-time hourly workers (49 vs. 44, respectively), according to
the 2014 Work and Education survey.

Another factor in lengthening Americans' work week is individuals
taking on more than one job. According to past Gallup data, 86% of
full-time workers have just one job, 12% have two, and 1% have three or
more. However, even by restricting the analysis to full-time workers who
have only one job, the average number of hours worked is 46 -- still
well over 40.

Friday, August 29, 2014

In recent days capitalists in Scotland have been coming out in favour of a YES or a NO in the coming referendum in Scotland. The split is revealing. It's more or less the same as in the UK over the EU, with smaller capitalist concerns catering for the home market favouring breaking away and bigger concerns producing for export favouring staying. From today's Times (29 August):

"Sir Brian Souter, chairman of Stagecoach, Ralph Topping, the former chief executive of William Hill, and Paddy Crerar, the founder of Crerar Hotels, were among those prepared to swing their entrepreneurial weight behind a "yes" vote on September 18.Their push came just a day after 130 influential businessmen, including Douglas Flint, the chairman of HSBC, and Andrew Mackenzie, who runs BHP Billiton, signed a similarly firm No missive to The Scotsman, warning that the case for independence had still not been made."

As someone from Edinburgh University's School of Business explained:

"Professor MacKay said that his research suggested that business attitudes towards independence tended to be dictated by where their customers were primarily located."

The 2014
global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) by researchers at the
University of Oxford covers 108 countries:

31 Low-Income Countries, 67
Middle-Income Countries and 10 High-Income Countries. These countries
have a total population of 5.4 billion people , some 78% of the world's
population.

The MPI assesses poverty at the individual level. If someone is deprived in a third or more of ten weighted indicators, the global index identifies them as ‘MPI poor' , and the extent – or intensity – of their poverty is measured by the number of deprivations they are experiencing .
Those indicators are based on health, education and living standards
and comprise the following factors: years of schooling, school
attendance, levels of nutrition, child mortality, access to cooking
fuel, sanitation (open defecation, for example), access to water,
ownership of assets, access to electricity and flooring material (eg,
dirt).

Based on a rural-urban analysis, of the 1.6 billion people identified as MPI poor, 85% live in rural areas . This is significantly higher than estimates of 70-75% in poverty, where income is used as the basis for determining poverty.

Poverty reduction is not necessarily
uniform across all poor people in a country or across population
subgroups. An overall improvement may leave the poorest of the poor
behind. The highest levels of inequality are to be found in 15
Sub-Saharan African countries and in Pakistan , India , Afghanistan
, Yemen and Somalia .

The researchers have paid special attention to the situation of the destitute, or what they term the poorest of the poor . Over half of the world's poor are classed as destitute .

Countries which have reduced MPI poverty
and destitution the most in absolute terms were mostly Low Income and
Least Developed Countries, with Nepal making the fastest progress.

The situation in India

Eradicating poverty in India requires
every person having access to safe drinking water, sanitation, housing,
nutrition, health and education. According to the MPI, out of its 1.2
billion-plus population, India is home to over 340 million destitute people and is the second poorest country in South Asia after war-torn Afghanistan. Some 640 million poor people live in India (40% of the world's poor),
mostly in rural areas, meaning an individual is deprived in one-third
or more of the ten indicators mentioned above (malnutrition, child
deaths, defecating in the open).

In South Asia, Afghanistan has the
highest level of destitution at 38%. This is followed by India at
28.5%. Bangladesh and Pakistan have much lower levels. The study placed
Afghanistan as the poorest country in South Asia, followed by India,
Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal.

Certainly GDP has been soaring in recent years but that says nothing about the lives, livelihoods and living conditions of the vast majority of the country. It is a statistic relevant only to capitalists thinking of the bottom line and investment opportunities.

Here is a much condensed tale of
farmers, family farmers growing soy beans, from the US and Brazil.
It's taken from a long chapter in Raj Patel's 'Stuffed and Starved'
about the many questions pertaining to a very contentious issue,
that of agribusiness's role in the production of soy and the
manufacture and distribution of the resultant products.

One family farmer from the US, Emelie
Peine, who farms 400 acres in Up State New York took time out to
visit farmers of similar or smaller sized farms in Brazil and
subsequently discussed her findings with Patel. He summarises her
observations thus 'the misconceptions of realities on both sides
of the Panama Canal, north and south, seem systematic. US farmers
find it easy to believe that all Brazilians are socially and
ecologically corrupt slave drivers and Brazilian farmers believe
their US counterparts to be suckled on taxpayer dollars' drawing
attention to 'countless articles in farming periodicals of
the US Midwest and Great Plains - - -and likewise fuelled in Brazil.'

The
chapter reveals differences in approach in Brazil between the small
family farmers who care about their land and want to have something
to leave their children and the mega farms run by giant corporations.
But, to home in on the Brazilian misconception about US farmers
reaping big payouts from government subsidies, 'since the
1996 farm bill, rich farmers and corporations systematically received
more than the majority of US farmers. The trend has continued: from
1996 to 2010 the top 10% of farms received 75% of total farm subsidy
payments. The average annual payment to the top 10% is $30,751,
while the bottom 80% receive only $587 per year and nearly two thirds
of American farmers collected no subsidy payments at all in 2010.

Emelie Peine: 'It's
not just that there are some farmers who need to understand each
other better. But farmers need to understand why they're competing
with each other. The thing that made me realize this most is that
Cargill is not only the largest exporter of US soybeans but also the
biggest exporter of Brazilian soybeans. So then what's the conflict
of trade rules about? Farmers need to understand that every
independent producer of tradable commodities in every country is
being squeezed by the same companies – and that the root of the
problem is the corporate structure of the global agricultural
economy, not one country's subsidies or another's environmental
practices.'

Some salient soy
facts:

Brazil's
biggest soy producer is Blairo Maggi, former governor of Mato
Grosso, with a 'family farm' of 350,000 acres, half of it under soy
and with plans to triple its size by now.

ILO estimates
numbers of workers in conditions of slavery in Brazil as between
25,000-40,000, (Maggi's farm having been found to be one of them)

Cargill, ADM
and Bunge finance 60% of Brazilian soy production and own ¾ of all
European processing facilities for whole bean exports from Brazil.

Although we recognise the realities
of the huge problems faced by workers and the public in general from
the enormous power wielded by multinational corporations, this is only one of many ongoing world problems and regular
readers will be fully aware of SOYMB's position on who the real
enemy is
and that is the capitalist system itself.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Access to wealth in the
U.S. is very unequal, as recent protest movements such as Occupy Wall
Street (OWS) reminded us. Wealth can be measured as:
1. net worth: total assets less total debts; or
2. financial wealth: non-housing wealth such as stocks, bonds, retirement accounts, savings accounts.

In 2010:
1. the top 1% of wealth owners held more than 34% of net worth;
2. the top 1% of financial asset owners held more than 35% of financial wealth.

Wealth and IncomeTo better understand wealth concentration, it can be helpful to
compare income and wealth ownership. In contrast to wealth (defined
above), income refers to flows of money into the household as in wages,
salaries, government transfer payments, and gifts.
An individual's religious participation and affiliation can have both
direct and indirect effects on asset ownership and wealth accumulation.
Cultural patterns that accompany religious participation often produce
behaviors that in turn have consequences for wealth inequality.

For-profit universities lure students in with promises of an education.

However, it turns out most of them only deliver higher debt and
worthless degrees. A new study by the organization CALDER found that
graduates of for-profit universities have no better chance at getting an
interview than people who never even went to college.
The researchers
sent out about 9,000 fake resumes to businesses and found "little
evidence of a benefit to listing a for-profit college relative to no
college at all." Community college grads actually fared a little better
off, but the authors of the study said that the difference was too small
to draw a conclusion. However, these for-profit universities often
charge students much higher tuition, and use private funding that
excludes students from federal repayment assistance programs.

Small elites, educated at independent schools and Oxbridge, still dominate top roles, suggests the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission study. Britain is "deeply elitist" because people educated at public school and Oxbridge have in effect created a "closed shop at the top". Elitism was so embedded in Britain "that it could be called 'social engineering'".

Those who had attended fee-paying or independent schools included:
71% of senior judges
62% of senior armed forces officers
55% of permanent secretaries (the most senior civil servants)
53% of senior diplomats.
50% of the House of Lords
45% of chairmen and women of public bodies
44% of the Sunday Times Rich List
43% of newspaper columnists
36% of the Cabinet
33% of MPs
26% of BBC executives
22% of the Shadow Cabinet

In sport, 35% of the England, Scotland and Wales rugby teams and 33% of the England cricket team also went to private schools.

This compares with 7% of the UK population as a whole.

Those who went to Oxford and Cambridge:
75% of senior judges
59% of the Cabinet
57% of permanent secretaries
50% of diplomats
47% of newspaper columnists
38% of the House of Lords
33% of the shadow cabinet
24% of MPs

Less than 1% of the whole population are Oxbridge graduates while 62% did not attend any university.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Many of us who work in the criminal justice system have come to understand the profound connection between poverty and
mass incarceration. Put simply, individuals with criminal histories –
even minor ones – find it exceedingly difficult to enter the
workforce and provide for their families. One pragmatic response to
this problem is to incarcerate fewer people, particularly in local
jails.

While much of the public debate and academic discourse focuses on the
challenges of reducing federal and state prison enrollments, mass
incarceration is a problem with a significant local dimension too. As
of June 30, 2013, an estimated 731,208 persons in the U.S. were confined
in local jails; a much larger total of 11.7 million persons
were imprisoned in local jails at some point over the preceding
year.

More than 6 out of 10 of those jailed in the U.S. have yet to
be convicted of any crime. Indeed, many of those held in pretrial
detention are actually eligible for release yet they cannot afford
to post bail – often nominal amounts of money. And contrary to popular
thinking, the overwhelming majority of criminal prosecutions concern
relatively minor offenses. In New York City, three out of four cases
that make it to criminal court are misdemeanors – a total of more than
235,000 cases in 2012.

"Worldwide, we've built more coal-burning power plants in the past decade than in any previous decade, and closures of old plants aren't keeping pace with this expansion," said Prof Steven Davis at University of California, Irvine. "Far from solving the climate change problem, we're investing heavily in technologies that make the problem worse," he said.

Almost the entire developing world is looking to coal as the power plant fuel of choice on the road to industrialisation.

The climate impacts of the world's fossil-fuelled power plants are being underestimated because of poor accounting, say researchers. Researchers calculated that the new coal and gas plants built in 2012 with an expected production life of 40 years, would in total, produce around 19bn tonnes of CO2. This is significantly more than the 14bn tonnes produced by all the existing fossil fuel plants in the world in the same year. All the existing fossil fuel plants in world will contribute 300bn tonnes of CO2 over their lifetimes.

"We've been hiding things from ourselves," said Prof Robert Socolow from Princeton university.

The web of life – everything linked
and interdependent. From the tiniest particle of soil to the African
elephant; from plankton to whales and consumers of sea food; from the
rice seeds germinating in Asian paddy fields to the plates on western
tables. It's easy to recognise the links in the chain, links which if
broken can disrupt the natural order and create problems throughout
the web.

On a purely physiological level what,
to be a part of this web of life, does humankind require?

Sun. Air. Water. Food. The fundamentals
for sustaining life of all forms. As far as shelter is required
organisms have evolved and developed according to climate and
discrete circumstances. Molluscs and turtles have shells, many animal
species dig holes in the ground or make nests of varying intricacy
and humankind gradually developed structures until we reached the
current wide variety of living spaces found today.

Considering the many centuries that
humankind has existed on this planet (how long?) it is within a
relatively short period of time that these four basic needs – sun,
air, water, food – have come to have a very different emphasis,
have come to be seen as something other than a basic necessity for
all, even though being deprived of any of them puts life in general
at great risk.

Since developing beyond the early form
when all lived 'close to the earth' to where humanity is now somehow
it has come to be accepted in certain circles that these four basics
are not to be assumed to be freely available to all who require them.
The need for life's basics has become limited by the ability to
access them. We are not expected to take them for granted and are
being separated from the very basics of the commons without our
consent.

This can be seen most clearly where
food deprivation is concerned. Malnutrition and hunger are widespread
and include millions. Subsistence farmers around the world have been
forcibly removed from their land and livelihoods in their hundreds of
thousands by agribusinesses and compliant governments. Wars, too,
have seen millions uprooted and displaced. Water deprivation and
pollution is affecting millions of individuals and thousands of
communities negatively. Air pollution is a serious and growing health
problem for the whole world's population.

(These three areas have been covered
extensively in many articles – posted on this blog and
published in Socialist Standard in print and online here )

As for the sun, who knows what plans
lie ahead to restrict our access to that shared resource?

Let's turn now to a 'web of living' and
see how our communities, both local and global, are linked and
interdependent in ways similar to the 'web of life' by looking beyond
the purely physiological level to how we might choose to organise our
lives for the benefit of all – in stark contrast to how everything
is ordered now which is to benefit the few and restrict or deny the
majority.

Assuming that we prioritise the four
basic necessities and also have some basic accommodation for the time
being how can we envisage a 'web of living' within our smaller, local
communities and also within and between our much larger regional and
global communities that will amply satisfy the multiplicity of our
wants, incorporating everything to give a well-balanced and healthy
life for all without fear or favour?

Administration – included in and
linked to all above, incorporating organisation, communication
systems, logistics,

This is far from a complete list but is
there to be added to. The point being is how we access the services
of any of the agencies or individuals above currently. If a trades
person's services are required we ask around for recommendations or
look online. Problems with one of the utilities ? Make a phone call.
We shop in town or online, register with a gym, a health centre or
golf club. We eat at home or get a take-away and now and then go to a
favourite restaurant.

Who are the people we have contact with
in these various activities or transactions? - People who are
specifically engaged in the area of work or expertise we are looking
for. People not much different from ourselves, who go out on a
regular basis to what we call work, or job or profession. Who runs
these places of work, manages the transport system, deals with
patients on a daily basis, stocks the shelves of the shops,
entertains us at the theatre, draws the designs and plans for new
housing and then builds them and fits them out, fixes the electrical
grid in a storm, takes out that sore tooth, picks the tomatoes or
potatoes, collects the trash, cuts your hair, services the car,
delivers the post? People like us. We do. We are the ones who
keep the whole thing running. Between us we manage the whole affair
from start to finish. - And we have access to all of this and more
but only if we have the magic password.

We are restricted in our choices by
lack of the necessary cash or credit. And the vast majority of the
world's population falls into this category – highly restricted
choice for severe lack of money.

In the system currently are many
inequalities of access both within local communities and between
different areas of the world. This manifests itself in many ways and
one would need to be both blind and deaf to be unaware of much of it.
Money has come to be an essential part of life, in fact of mere
existence. Without it you can do almost nothing. It is not a
physiological necessity but a false 'need', a manufactured need
adding an unnecessary layer to our everyday and lifelong
transactions.

There is no way that the current
system, capitalism, can be inclusive and offer equal access to all.
Full employment and 'fair' wages are a hopeless cause which must
surely be widely recognised. Nationalism and its call for manufacturing to stay
at home won't fix the problem. Calls like these are red herrings
which serve to stop us focussing on the real problem, the elephant in
the room, which is the system. The system of profit before
people or planet that runs very well for those few at the top of the
pyramid. For the rest of us, the ones running the show all around the
world, why don't we just expand operations to include all those who
currently find themselves surplus to requirements and get on with our
organising and managing and doing, - without the money?

Object

The establishment of a system of society based upon the
common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments
for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the
whole community.http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/our-object-and-declaration-principles

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson says that he will seek a return to Parliament.

It’s Boris for P.M. it’s said,
In some kind of pathetic joke;
Imagine our great country led,
By a posh Bullingdon Club bloke! (1)
But Boris isn’t quite the clown,
That often he pretends to be;
These Eton chaps from Henley town, (2)
Play bumbling fatheads to a tee.

Make no mistake, Bo-Jo is no,
Buffoon or loon upon a bike;
There’s plenty gormless Tories though,
That he is setting out to psych.
The man who brought us Barclay bikes, (3)
And banned the bulky bendy-bus;
Announces through the mikes he likes,
The razzmatazz and all the fuss!

And now he’s bored with London’s grime,
The adoration that he craves;
Will only be fed by a climb,
Up to the Cabinet of Knaves.
For under that blonde mane above,
That’s coiffured oh-so artfully;
Lies one who shows no greater love,
For Boris Johnson more than he!

(1) Prominent members include David Cameron and George Osborne and deceased member, Prince Yusupov, the assassin of Grigori Rasputin.(2) Johnson was previously M.P. for Henley.(3) Barclays are withdrawing from the scheme having paid less than half of the original £50m --the tab will be picked up by the taxpayer.

Americans constantly hear about the threat of "entitlements," which in
the case of Social Security and Medicare are more properly defined as
"earned benefits." The real threat is the array of entitlements demanded
by the very rich. The following annual numbers may help to put our
country's expenses and benefits in perspective.

$220 Billion: Teacher Salaries

According
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there are just over four million
preschool, primary, secondary, and special education school teachers in
the U.S., earning an average of $54,740.

$246 Billion: State and Local Pensions

Census
data shows a total annual (2012) payout of about $246 billion. Only
about $100 billion of this came from state and local governments, with
the remainder funded by employee contributions and investment earnings. A
recent Pew study showed a little over $100 billion in annual state
contributions to pensions, health care, and non-pension benefits.

Social
Security is the major source of income for most of the elderly, and it
is an earned benefit. As of 2010, according to the Urban Institute, the
average two-earner couple making average wages throughout their
lifetimes receive less in Social Security benefits than they paid in.

$2,200 Billion: Tax Avoidance

That's
$2.2 trillion in tax expenditures, tax underpayments, tax havens, and
corporate nonpayment. It is estimated that two-thirds of tax breaks
accrue to the top quintile of taxpayers.

$5,000 Billion: Investment Wealth

That's
$5 trillion dollars a year, the annual amount gained in U.S. wealth
from the end of 2008 to the middle of 2013. Even though the whole
country continued to grow in productivity, most of the new wealth went
to the very richest people. According to Oxfam, the wealthiest one
percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009,
while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.

Another View: Annual Per Capita Numbers

The
following are averages, which are skewed in the case of tax breaks and
investment income, as a result of the excessive takings of the .1% and
the .01%. Details of the calculations can be found here.

$8,600 for each of the Safety Net recipients

$14,600 for each of the Social Security recipients

$27,333 for each of the Pension recipients

$54,740 for each of the Teachers

$200,000 for each of the Tax Break recipients among the richest 1%

$500,000 for each of the Investment Income recipients among the richest 1%

The super-rich feel they deserve all the tax breaks and the accumulation of wealth from the productivity of others.

Monday, August 25, 2014

A survey finds that most US workers
are very stressed—and that for nearly a quarter of all employees, the
top priority is simply showing up at work. According to LiveScience, the study from ComPsych Corp., an employee assistance program provider, found that:

More than 60% of employees report high levels of stress, and another
32% report constant, but not as high, levels of stress. Low stress? Only
5% of those surveyed are that lucky.

As for that top
priority, 22% listed “presenteeism”—just being present—as their main
concern and the most important thing to do at work.

Why so stressed? Almost 40% say it’s because their workload is increasing.

Stress causes 36% of workers to waste an hour or more each day, the
study found. It also causes almost 30% of employees to miss anywhere
from three to six days of work per year.

“As employers
continue to take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to hiring, people
who currently have jobs—many of whom have taken on extra work—are
starting to show signs of prolonged stress,” warns the ComPsych CEO.
“This can result in burnout and reduced performance.”

Who are these Central American Children? Although the media talk about “Central American children,” almost all of
the detainees are, in fact, coming from only three of the six countries
of Central America: Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. There are
almost none from Belize, Nicaragua, or Costa Rica. Anybody who
remembers the 1980s can probably guess why. The enormous quantities of
military “aid” that the United States poured into Guatemala, El
Salvador, and Honduras helped create an environment of violently
enforced inequality whose bitter fruits are still being reaped.In fact, the so-called “crisis” of these last months is anything but
new, while the “debate” over where to temporarily detain the children is
beside the point. The number of Central American youths crossing the
U.S.-Mexican border has been rising steadily since 2000. Figures for
minors apprehended at the border have gone up from a few thousand a year
as the twenty-first century began, to 6,000-8,000 annually through
2011, 13,625 in 2012, and 24,668 in 2013. A study released in February 2014 predicted that as many as 60,000 children were likely to be apprehended this year.

Why the Children Are Coming?

First, U.S. policies
directly led to today’s crises in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.
Since Washington orchestrated the overthrow of the reformist,
democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954,
it has consistently cultivated repressive military regimes, savagely
repressed peasant and popular movements for social change, and imposed
economic policies including so-called free trade ones that favor foreign
investors and have proven devastating to the rural and urban poor.
Refugees from U.S.-sponsored dirty wars in Guatemala and El Salvador
-- mostly peasants whose communities had been subjected to
scorched-earth policies and the depredations of right-wing death squads
-- began to pour into the United States in the 1980s.
The refugee flood
from Honduras didn’t begin until the United States supported a military
coup against that country’s elected leftist president in 2009. The
youths crossing the border today are often the children and
grandchildren of those initial refugees, and are fleeing the endemic
violence and economic destruction left behind by the wars and the
devastation that resulted from them.
In other words, the policies that
led to the present “crisis” were promoted over the decades with similar
degrees of enthusiasm by Republicans and Democrats.

Second, an enormous demand for undocumented labor had already drawn
the parents of many of these children to the United States where they
clean houses and yards, wash dishes, and grow and process food. Their
underpaid labor helps sustain the U.S. economy. For generations, this
country’s immigration policy has focused on using Mexicans and Central
Americans as “workers” without granting them legal and human rights.
But workers are people and people have children. In other words, the
present crisis stems in part from the way our economy depends on
separating parents from their children in order to exploit their cheap
labor.

Finally, the communities and school systems that the federal
government expects to receive the border-crossing youth need more
federal support. Many of the locales receiving immigrants are indeed in
crisis. If, thanks to federal legislation and federal agencies, these
children are being released in large numbers to communities in which
schools are already underfunded, then the federal government should
guarantee the services that it requires communities to provide them.
Instead of spending
billions of dollars annually underwriting detention, deportation, and
the further militarization of the borderlands, it should direct those
funds to fulfilling human needs.
All parties should be criticized for
their policies in Central America (including President Obama’s free
trade agenda), their economic and immigration policies (that criminalize
workers), and the ways they are pitting immigrant youth against poor
Americans in a struggle for scarce resources.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Bombing Iraq, as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel William Astore indicates this week in “The American Cult of Bombing,”
has become a national pastime. (These days, you can’t be president
without sending in the bombers and drones.) So let’s try to get our
heads around the latest U.S. air strikes in northern Iraq against the
forces of the new “caliphate.” It's a campaign that President Obama has
already indicated is likely to go on for months and may soon
enough spread south to the Baghdad area. It looks like Washington has
finally created the perfect machine for the weapons industry.

Think of it this way: first Washington provides the Iraqi military
with training and massive infusions of military equipment to the tune
of $25 billion. Next that military, faced with its first serious
opposition, the militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS),
numbering in the thousands against security forces in the hundreds of
thousands, collapses. In June, two full divisions, 30,000 Iraqi troops,
flee the city of Mosul, abandoning their posts in the face of the
advance of ISIS fighters. In all, four divisions of the country’s
14-division army disintegrate throughout the north. Left behind is a
massive trove of U.S.-supplied weaponry, including 1,500 Humvees, 52
U.S.-made M198 howitzers, tanks, trucks, rifles, and ammunition.

ISIS militants, who seem remarkably capable of operating such
equipment without an American trainer or adviser in sight, then turn
some of that weaponry (as well as weapons captured from the Syrian
military) on U.S.-backed forces, including, in the north, Kurdish pesh
merga militias. (They have evidently even brought tanks into play near
the Turkish border.) To save its Kurdish allies from disaster, the
Obama administration then sends in the U.S. Air Force (both
fighter-bombers and Predator drones) in close support of the beleaguered
Kurdish forces. Doing what air power seems most capable of, the planes
begin destroying the armored vehicles and artillery pieces ISIS has
brought to bear in Kurdish areas. In other words, U.S. air power is
called in to take out U.S. military equipment (and anyone manning it).

To complete the circle, both the Iraqis defending Baghdad and the
Kurds now desperately need new weaponry, and Washington is already
starting to supply it in the north and soon undoubtedly in the south as
well. Can there be any question that this is a win-win situation for
the American arms industry and the military-industrial complex? It
gives new meaning to American bombing campaigns that, since 1991, have
proven to be disastrous regional destabilizers. Think of this as an
innovative profit center for American industry and a jobs-creation
exercise of the first order: we provide the weapons, we destroy them,
then we provide more.

Given Astore’s “cult” of bombing and its remarkable futility in
policy terms, this is a significant development. And don’t for a second
think that it’s a one-of-a-kind situation. After all, Washington has
put at least $50 billion in weaponry and training into Afghanistan’s
security forces. So the future is bright.

Today there are about 231.5 million international migrants in the world - three percent of the global population.

The Harper government is hoping to make banishment a more regular activity now that their Bill C-24 "Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act" has become law. It raises the bar for acquiring citizenship and allows it to be revoked by a parliamentary minister, with no possible appeal in court.

Josh Paterson, executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said in a press release: “In Canada, lawfully obtained citizenship has always been permanent — once a Canadian, always a Canadian — and all Canadians have always had equal citizenship rights. This bill turns the whole idea of being Canadian upside-down, so that the Canadian citizenship of some people will be worth less than the Canadian citizenship of others. That is wrong.”

The new law weakens the bonds of citizenship, potentially threatening the very essence of citizenship. Someone found guilty of treason, high treason, espionage or terrorism can have his citizenship revoked without even the benefit of a judicial hearing. If the citizen has a connection to a foreign country, the minister may send a letter advising that his citizenship is under review. If the citizen fails to respond — or fails to respond sufficiently, in the minister’s estimation — he will be on a plane out of Canada to whatever country we can send him. In cases where the citizen believes he or she would thus be stateless, the onus is on the citizen to prove that he or she “is not a citizen of any country of which the minister has reasonable grounds to believe the person is a citizen.” You will be excused if you mistakenly think this law targets foreign-born Canadians. Such targeting is implied, but even native-born Canadians could be deported. Under the guise of “strengthening” citizenship, citizenship is deeply compromised. Upon seeing the words “treason” or “terrorism”, we may wave away concerns about the over-zealous application of this law. No one wants terrorists running loose in Canada. Unfortunately, the language of the law affords the government with the power to strip Canadian citizenship for not only traitors, but political activists, as well. If a citizen were to be labelled a terrorist by a foreign nation — perhaps the United States, Britain or Israel — the powers of expulsion would kick in.

The legal profession , the Canadian Bar Association, explains “we oppose expansion of the grounds to revoke and bar citizenship. Removing citizenship is one of the most serious consequences that a society may impose, and should remain an exceptional process.” They point out that the law “ maintains the risk of statelessness for some persons. It is possible for a child born abroad to be excluded from Canadian citizenship and yet have no claim to citizenship in the country where they were born. Many countries restrict giving citizenship to a child born there who has foreign national parents. A child born abroad to Canadian parents may be stateless...”

Rejected refugee claimants — and refugee claimants from countries the government considers safe — are eligible under the new law for medical care only when they pose a threat to public health. That means no coverage for heart problems, pregnancy, infant vaccinations, diabetes, and any other ailments that threaten the health of the refugee but aren't a risk to public health.
The distinction between what the government calls "bogus" and "genuine" refugees has drawn substantial criticism from opponents of its immigration and refugee system reforms. The Federal Court found the government's treatment of refugees is "cruel and unusual" because it jeopardizes their health and shocks the conscience of Canadians. Judge Anne Mactavish ruled "The 2012 modifications to the [Interim Federal Health Program] potentially jeopardize the health, the safety and indeed the very lives, of these innocent and vulnerable children in a manner that shocks the conscience and outrages Canadian standards of decency. I have found as a fact that lives are being put at risk." Mactavish wrote in her ruling that there is "no persuasive evidence to show that the changes to the eligibility and coverage provisions of the IFHP have served to deter unmeritorious claims, thereby reducing the cost of the program."

Dr. Philip Berger, co-founder of Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care accused government ministers of pre-judging clims. “They've [asylum seekers] not had a determination yet, yet through some clairvoyant power of deduction, Minister Alexander seems to know that they're bogus before they've had their hearing. Perhaps he can explain that finally after the last year of accusing all refugee claimants of being bogus."

Ottawa doctor Doug Gruner said Alexander isn't being truthful with Canadians when he says the policy only affects failed refugee claimants. Gruner calls the changes "horrific."
"That's 100 per cent false information. Not only does this policy affect all refugee claimants, of which almost half become Canadian citizens, it also affects refugees that come here as landed immigrants, soon to become Canadian citizens. These are the privately sponsored refugees. They're sponsored by church groups and other social organizations in conjunction with the federal government of Canada. And when they come here, this policy is preventing them from accessing health care."

A 3-year CCFC campaign against false and deceptive marketing ends with a decisive victory for families.

Today, the Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement with Dr. Robert Titzer, creator of the controversial Your Baby Can Read!,
a $200 video series that encouraged parents to put infants as young as
three months in front of screens. The settlement is the final chapter in
Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood's long effort to hold the
makers of Your Baby Can Read! accountable for its false and deceptive advertising.

In 2011, CCFC and its attorneys at Georgetown University’s Institute for Public Representation filed a FTC complaint documenting how the marketing of Your Baby Can Read! was rife with false and unsubstantiated claims about infant learning.
In 2012, the FTC filed false advertising charges against Your Baby Can LLC and Dr. Titzer.
Your Baby Can and former CEO Hugh Penton agreed to settle the FTC's
charges, but Dr. Titzer formed a new company, The Infant Learning
Company, and continued to claim Your Baby Can Read! could teach
babies as young as nine months to read.
As part of the new settlement,
Dr. Titzer and The Infant Learning Company are now barred from using the
phrase “Your Baby Can Read.” Both defendants are prohibited from making
any unsubstantiated claims about the performance of any product that
teaches reading and Dr. Titzer is barred from endorsing any product
unless he has a reasonable basis for its marketing claims.

The Ferguson
Police have now released a video that shows police Officer Darren Wilson
receiving a commendation six months before he became known to the whole nation as the cop who gunned down an unarmed 18-year-old.
The irony is obvious to anyone who watches the footage of this proud
young officer receiving the award at a ceremony in the City Council
chamber as Ferguson’s six council members applaud.
“Officer
Wilson, in recognition of outstanding police work while investigating a
suspicious-vehicle call,” Chief Thomas Jackson says in making the
presentation. “Acting alone, you struggled with one subject and [were]
able to gain control of the subject and his car keys until assistance
arrived. Later, during the interview, it was discovered that the subject
was breaking down a large quantity of marijuana for sale.”
Jackson adds, “Great job, Darren.”

But there is another,
unnoticed irony in the venue itself. Three times a month—one day and two
nights—the City Council chamber also serves as home to the incredibly
busy and extremely profitable Ferguson municipal court.
A report
issued just last week by the nonprofit lawyer’s group ArchCity
Defenders notes that in the court’s 36 three-hour sessions in 2013, it
handled 12,108 cases and 24,532 warrants. That is an average of 1.5
cases and three warrants per Ferguson household. Fines and court fees
for the year in this city of just 21,000 people totaled $2,635,400.
The sum made the municipal court the city’s second-biggest source of
revenue. It is also almost certainly was a major factor in the
antagonism between the police and the citizenry preceding the tragedy
that resulted when Wilson had another encounter with a subject six
months after he got his commendation.

Any complete investigation into how Michael Brown came to be sprawled dead in the street with a half-dozen bullet wounds
must consider not just the cop but the system he served, a system whose
primary components include a minor court that generates major money,
much of it from poor and working people.
Five of the six City Council members who meet in this chamber are white,
even though the city itself is more than 70 percent black. The City
Council appoints the municipal judge, currently Ron Brockmeyer, who is
also white.
But when this same chamber serves as Ferguson Municipal Court, a disproportionate number of the defendants are black.

The
immediate explanation is that the bulk of the cases arise from car
stops. The ArchCity Defenders report notes: “Whites comprise 29% of the
population of Ferguson but just 12.7% of vehicle stops. After being
stopped in Ferguson, blacks are almost twice as likely as whites to be
searched (12.1% vs. 6.9%) and twice as likely to be arrested (10.4% vs.
5.2%).”
Lest anyone contend that blacks inherently merit greater police attention than whites, the report offers another statistic.
“Searches
of black individuals result in discovery of contraband only 21.7% of
the time, while similar searches of whites produce contraband 34.0% of
the time.”
That would suggest both that whites were more likely to
be stopped when there was actual probable cause and that blacks were
more likely to be stopped when there was not. And the antagonism sure to
be generated by such racial disparities was magnified by the sheer
number of cases.

The report cites a court employee as saying the docket for a typical
three-hour court session has up to 1,500 cases. The report goes on to
say that “in addition to such heavy legal prosecution,” the Ferguson
court and others like it in nearby towns “engage in a number of
operational procedures that make it even more difficult for defendants
to navigate the courts.”
The report goes on, “For example, a
Ferguson court employee reported that the bench routinely starts hearing
cases 30 minutes before the appointed time and then locks the doors to
the building as early as five minutes after the official hour, a
practice that could easily lead a defendant arriving even slightly late
to receive an additional charge for failure to appear.”

The
lawyers of ArchCity Defenders specialize in representing the indigent
and the homeless. They noticed that many of their clients had multiple
warrants on minor charges issued by municipal courts in Ferguson and the
other 80 municipalities in St. Louis County that have their own courts
and police.
“They didn’t just have one case, they had 10 cases,” says Thomas Harvey, the organization’s 44-year-old executive director.
The
warrants too often precluded the clients from securing shelter and
services, and access to job programs. The lawyers sought some remedy in
the issuing courts.
“It kept being about the money,” Harvey
recalls. “We were telling the court, ‘They don’t have any money because
they’re homeless.’”

The clients felt sure they were
being targeted because they were black and poor, and told the lawyers
tales of unfair treatment by everybody from the cops to the bailiffs to
the judges.
“I’ll be real honest, I didn’t believe them,” Harvey says.
With
the help of college students, ArchCity Defenders started a court watch
program eight months ago. They concluded that much of what their clients
had been saying was all too true. Impoverished defendants were
frequently ordered to pay fines that were triple their monthly income.
Some ended up with no income at all as they sat in jail for weeks,
awaiting a hearing.

“It’s not just about Michael Brown and this officer,” Harvey says.
The
statistics assembled for the report concerning race and car stops in
Ferguson were no great surprise, especially considering that its police
department is proportionately even whiter than its City Council, with
just three blacks among its 52 cops. The number that jumped out was the
huge revenue, big bucks for a little burg.
“Anybody who makes a revenue source a line of a budget becomes dependent on it,” Harvey suggests.
But if the system’s objective was money, the result was still that many people felt targeted because of race and class.
“For
many of the poorest citizens of the region, the municipal courts and
police departments inflict a kind of low level harassment involving
traffic stops, court appearances, high fines, and the threat of jail for
failure to pay without a meaningful inquiry into whether an individual
has the means to pay,” the report says.
By the remarkable stats
the report offers, Wilson might have been expected to add one more case
to the municipal court excess by issuing Brown and his friend summonses
for walking down the middle of the road.

That same
venue where Wilson received his commendation and the City Council
members applauded is where justice is insulted wholesale three times a
week.
And an entire city turns poisonous. The fury of the
protesters was sparked not only by killing of Brown but by the
circumstances that led up to it.
The Ferguson municipal court canceled its August sessions because of the turmoil, but it is expected to resume in September.

In The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs, Private Sector Myths, Mariana Mazzucato, professor of The Economics of Innovation at Sussex University, points out that capitalists are not the visionary risk-takers that free-market economists, the corporate media and politicians would have us believe. Their focus on maximizing profits actually makes capitalists risk-averse. Contrary to public opinion, neither Steve Jobs nor Apple had a critical role in the development of the Internet or iPhones. Hard disk drives were developed by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Internet was constructed by U.S. federal agencies working with publicly funded universities. The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the World Wide Web were conceived by U.K. government-funded scientists. Touch screen technology was developed in government labs in the U.S. and U.K. GPS was developed by the U.S. military and continues to be funded by the U.S. Air Force. Lithium Ion batteries were developed by U.S. Department of Energy scientists. Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) and Thin Film Transistors (TFT) were developed in government-funded labs. So were SIRI, an artificial intelligence program, and the critical Web Search algorithm. Steve Jobs and Apple can be credited with eye-catching designs and effective marketing which allowed their shareholders to make billions from the socialization of research and the privatization of profits.

Most research is funded by governments because they do not have to answer to shareholders. They can have broader goals. In the U.S., the federal government funds two-thirds of the country’s research and development: private business funds less than twenty percent. Capitalism has long depended on governments to fund research. In earlier times, governments funded research on canon fire and ocean shipping. They funded construction of railways, telegraph then telephone lines, and funded research on aerodynamics and jet engines. After government funding has made production profitable private business takes charge.

Most new drugs are developed in publicly funded labs. These are then modified slightly, patented and sold to government-funded health care systems at hundreds of times the production cost. Existing capital is locked into profits from fossil fuels; private capital cannot be expected to take the lead with widely coordinated action will be required to rapidly replace dependence on fossil fuels with solar, wind, tidal, wave, and geothermal power. Wider action is blocked by vested interest and lobbying as long as corporations and their shareholders can continue to make massive profits from fossil fuels.

A report by Landman Economics concluded that changes made since 2010, which include the introduction of a £500-a-week household benefit cap and the so-called bedroom tax, will cut annual spending by £30.5bn by 2016/17. According to the analysis, the impact of this will be felt more by working families, who will suffer a loss of social security support worth £17.9bn a year by 2016/17, over twice the £6.2bn cut experienced by out-of-work families.

TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said ‘Ministers like to say that their welfare reforms target workshy scroungers and will get them back to work. But the fact is that the bulk of the cuts hit low-paid families already in work, as well as pensioners who have no way to make up the money lost as a result of Chancellor George Osborne’s social security axe. With nearly half the total cost of welfare changes falling on working families with children, the prime minister has already failed his own new family test, announced just this week. The government has been steadily chipping away at the social security safety net we all pay into and expect will support us when we need help.’

Most benefit cuts, including the £13.8bn annual reduction in tax credits, are a result of the chancellor’s decision to change the measure for uprating benefits from the Retail Prices Index to the lower Consumer Prices Index. In addition, the government’s Universal Credit programme, which is intended to ensure people are always better off in work, will lead to a further £5bn of annual cuts – almost half of which will fall on pensioner families. This is because new UC claimants of this age will no longer get Pension Credit and instead will receive less generous support, as well as being subject to the government’s new sanctions regime.

O’Grady went on to say ‘While many people may think that the recovery means the end of the squeeze on their social security support, the worse cuts are still to come. This new nastier social security system is a world away from the support people expect having paid their national insurance contributions.’

Meanwhile the BBC reports that more people are suffering from malnutrition as a result of worsening food poverty, experts have warned. The Faculty of Public Health said conditions like rickets were becoming more apparent because people could not afford quality food in their diet. Health figures recently revealed a 19% increase in the number of people admitted to hospital with malnutrition over the past year. UK food prices had risen by 12% since 2007. It also noted that in the same period, UK workers had suffered a 7.6% fall in wages

Friday, August 22, 2014

Walmart’s average sale Associate makes $8.81 per hour,
according to IBISWorld, an independent market research group. This
translates to annual pay of $15,576, based upon Walmart’s full-time
status of 34 hours per week. This is significantly below the 2010 Federal Poverty Level of $22,050 for a family of four. The Wall Street Journal reported that the average Walmart cashier makes just $8.48 an hour, far below the $11.22 national average for all cashiers.

According to a 2011 report,
if Walmart started paying a $12/hour minimum wage, its workers
currently earning less than $9 per hour could each earn $3,250 to $6,500
more per year before taxes. If Walmart were to pass this cost directly
to shoppers, the average consumer would need to pay only 46 cents more
per shopping trip, or $12.50 per year.

Walmart's own corporate fact sheet state that the average full-time hourly wage for Walmart associates is $11.75. Since everyone at Walmart is an 'associate', including CEO Mike Duke who in 2010 received $18.7 million (1,201 times the annual income of the average sales associate), the mean wage is higher than the median wage.

from here and from Raj Patel's 'Stuffed and Starved' chapter 8, note 85

Nicholas Wade in his latest book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, arguing that economic success can, at least in part, be attributed to racial differences with a genetic foundation. He states that the latest research on the human genome establishes beyond doubt that there is indeed a biological basis for race, and that the human population can be broadly divided into three main racial types: sub-Saharan Africans, Caucasians and East Asians. In addition to obvious physical differences – notably skin colour – natural selection on the main continents has resulted in marked differences in some aspects of brain function, which has in turn influenced the kind of economic success enjoyed by some countries, and missed out by others.

Nearly 150 population geneticists, who study how genes collectively contribute to physical and behavioural attributes, have now signed a letter criticising Wade misappropriating research from their field to support his arguments about inheritable differences among human societies – epitomised in a biological basis for race.

“Wade juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate account of our research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in IQ test results, political institutions and economic development,” the letter says. “We reject Wade’s implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork. They do not. We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade’s conjectures,” it says.

Britain, and specifically the English, pioneered the Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century because since the Middle Ages the rich had more surviving children than the poor and this meant that the values of the upper middle classes – nonviolence, literacy, thrift and patience – spread as genetic traits within the population, according to Wade, an old Etonian. Europe benefited early on from industrialisation because their people were more genetically predisposed to being open and tolerant, unlike the Chinese, while the Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ because the more intelligent among them were richer and therefore able to afford more children, he says.

With all Africans reduced to a single racial category, Wade commences explaining why genes cause its problems. Africans did not “develop the ingrained behaviors of trust, nonviolence and thrift that a productive economy requires.” To advance, they need “the transformation of a population’s traits from the violent, short-term, impulsive behavior typical of many hunter-gatherer and tribal societies into the more disciplined, future-oriented behavior seen in East Asian societies” and in the West. The failure of “Africa” to evolve the necessary traits for success in our modern world is not for lack of resources. Rather, after colonialism, Wade writes, Africa “reverted to the kind of social system to which Africans had become adapted during the previous centuries.” By “adapted,” he means “genetically adapted,” a point made explicit at the beginning of the book. Wade offers no evidence to support his genetic story of Africa’s poverty because none exists. In the absence of evidence, Wade resorts to homicide statistics.

Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Chicago, said that Wade should be deeply embarrassed because his propensity to “make up” stories resembles a theologian more than a science journalist. “For Wade to write a whole book resting on this speculative house of cards – the idea that genes and natural selection are everything in explaining culture – is simply bad popular science,” Professor Coyne said.

Mark Stoneking, an evolutionary geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig in Germany said that Wade is wrong to say that modern genomics shows there is a biological basis for race. “How to define the concept of race biologically is not easy, but to me one prediction is that not only should one be able to define discrete clusters of people that correspond to races, there should be distinct boundaries between them,” Dr Stoneking said. “And if you look at patterns of genetic variation in human populations, you find they are distributed along geographic ‘clines’ with no distinct boundaries,” he said. “It's like a rainbow. Sure, I can identify parts of a rainbow that are different –red, yellow, blue, and so forth – but there are no sharp boundaries between them; a rainbow is a gradient of colours.”

Wade is a science writer, not a scientist. The people criticising him are actual scientists and specialists in the field, and he is using their research to support racist theories. So when the people who did the actual research say he does not know what he is talking about, SOYMB would go with the scientists rather than Wade.

In the New York Times Book Review of July 13, David Dobbs wrote that it was "a deeply flawed, deceptive, and dangerous book" with "pernicious conceits". Biologist H. Allen Orr writes, "Hard evidence for Wade's thesis is nearly nonexistent." In the Boston Review, sociologist Philip Cohen places it "in the grand tradition of scientific racism." Discussion of human race isn't shunned in academia, they say: it's merely kept within the bounds of what is known and unknown. On race, researchers "say about all we can say," in the words of UC Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen. Wade, Eisen says, "is trying not just to make it OK to voice racist theories about the origins of human phenotypic variation, he is yearning to give them the validity of science." Wade has blurred "the distinction between storytelling and science," writes Eisen.

Of 162 countries covered by the Institute for Economics and Peace’s (IEP’s) latest study, just 11 were not involved in conflict of one kind or another.

The only ones to achieve the lowest score for all forms of conflict were Switzerland, Japan, Qatar, Mauritius, Uruguay, Chile, Botswana, Costa Rica, Vietnam, Panama and Brazil. And even those countries are not entirely exempt from other problems that, the IEP says, could lend to conflict further down the line. Japan and Vietnam are involved in territorial disputes with China. Qatar is one of the countries financing jihadist groups fighting in Syria. Switzerland exports armaments. Brazil’s paramilitary police have been involved in almost war-like conflict with gangs in the favelas.

Since 2009, while higher-income sectors saw a drop between 2.1 and 2.5 percent, workers in the three lowest-paid groups were hit much harder, with wage declines between 3.6 and 4.6 percent. Some of the hardest-hit professions within the three lowest-paid groups were maids, housekeepers, home health and personal care aides, and restaurant workers, whose wage decline ranged from 5.8 to 8.3 percent.

Low-paid jobs are on the rise. Despite the stagnant or diminished level of wages more people found work in lower-paid occupations than in any other industry in the past year. Low-wage and mid-wage jobs constituted a combined 67 percent of job growth from July 2013 to July 2014.

“These real wage declines mean that workers in mid - and low - wage jobs are falling further and further behind,” said National Employment Law Project (NELP) executive director Christine Owens. “These losses are part of an alarming trend toward greater inequality and a shrinking share of the economic pie going to workers’ wages, especially low - and mid - wage workers.

NELP, an nonpartisan organization that has been fighting for a higher national minimum wage, has analyzed job growth data twice since 2009 and found that the trend has been consistent every year: real median hourly wages had declined by 2.8 percent last year, on average, across all occupations, with the greatest losses hitting the exact same groups — mid- and low-wage workers, particularly maids, housekeepers, care aides, and restaurant cooks. Over the next decade, one in four American workers is expected to work a low-wage job.

The World Bank, the governments of wealthy countries, and - most importantly - the United Nations Millennium Campaign all agree the world is getting better, thanks to the spread of free market capitalism and western aid. Development is working, and soon, poverty rates are declining one day in the very near future, extreme poverty will be no more. Except, according to Dr Jason Hickel who lectures at the London School of Economics, it is just not true. Poverty is not disappearing as quickly as they say. In fact, according to some measures, poverty has been getting significantly worse.

Bank of America has agreed to pay a record $16.7bn (£10bn) to US authorities for misleading investors about the quality of loans it sold.

The associate attorney general, explained: "It's kind of like going to your neighbourhood grocery store to buy milk advertised as fresh, only to discover that store employees knew the milk you were buying had been left out on the loading dock, unrefrigerated, the entire day before, yet they never told you. And just like you might be in for an unpleasant surprise when you got home and poured yourself that glass of milk, investors - such as public pension funds and federally-insured financial institutions - were unpleasantly met with billions of dollars in losses when those securities investments soured."

Not all bad news for Bank of America. Even after the penalty payment, it still left them with third-quarter profits of $5.3bn and the shares of Bank of America opened 1.5% higher following the settlement.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

A Dhaka hospital has reached an
understanding with the family of a dead man: all dues, more than a
million Taka (the Bangladesh currency), will be paid to the hospital
within months. The understanding gave opportunity to the family to have
the dead body of the man – a father, a husband.

The man died in the hospital while he was
undergoing treatment there. The treatment cost was a few million Taka.
The family paid a part of that amount of money, and was failing to pay
the rest. The hospital withheld handing over the dead body to the
grief-stricken family. It was claiming full payment of its fees and
charges. The family, the dead man's two children and wife, was helpless.
The Dhaka journalists brought the incident to the health minister's
notice. The minister requested the hospital to hand over the dead body
considering the incident of failure from a humanist view. The dead body
was handed over after the compromise was concluded.

How the money, more than a million, will be paid? The daughter of the dead man doesn't know as she claimed.

The man died on August 15, 2014, and the dead body was handed over on August 17, 2014.

From a business point of view, one may
say, withholding the dead body was not wrong. One may say: it would have
set a precedent if the dead body was handed over without having all the
dues clear; others, in future, will take opportunity of not paying
hospital charges and fees; the hospital has not opened a charity window;
it has invested money.

It's a pure money-question: investment and return, loss and profit, ways investment and profit are made.

The dead body-story once again exposes
the face of the market, exposes the reality of handing over health care
to private capital. Questions centering the dead body once again search
the relevant parts of the constitution of the republic that promise
honor, safety and life for all its citizens.

At last, the axe of reason and the power
of justice will find the fact: life is not a commodity, life is not
tradable, life should not be kept at the mercy of market.